"And last night, I spoke to my grandson, Zachary. And I told him, `Grandpa is going to be available to make rockets and planes with you,'" Goldin added as his wife, Judy, looked on during the all-hands meeting at the agency's headquarters.
"And his yelps of joy told me that Judy had me make the right decision."
A few hours later, Goldin told reporters in a cross-country teleconference that the terrorist attacks -- and more specifically, a subsequent visit to the World Trade Center site in New York City -- triggered his decision to leave NASA.
"I'll never be the same after that tour. You know, on television and in the movies, you see what war is like. But to be there and to smell it and see it and hear it and talk about it, you're never the same," Goldin said.
"So I would say Sept. 11 was precipitating, but being at ground zero was something that has shaped my life, the rest of my life," he added. "We Americans take too much for granted, and I did a lot of evaluation when I came home on that trip, and I did a lot of talking as a result of it."
Like many Americans, Goldin said, he reevaluated his life and decided too much time was being spent at work -- an estimated 18 hours a day -- and too little was being spent with his family.
"You ask yourself what are you working for, and I find that I get such intellectual satisfaction and such personal satisfaction from the job, that it drives me," the outgoing NASA chief said.
"But on the other hand, when all gets said and done, if I do have a family, and I don't interact with them, what have I accomplished in my life," he added. "My life was out of balance."
The White House has yet to name a successor, and whoever is appointed to follow in Goldin's footsteps will have to be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. An interim administrator might be appointed before a permanent replacement is named and confirmed.
A former Cold Warrior who managed classified satellite projects for an aerospace company in California, Goldin, 61, will remain in Washington at least for the time being, taking a job as a senior fellow with the non-profit Council on Competitiveness.
The think tank was created in 1986 to foster technological innovation and workforce development while benchmarking the performance of the U.S. economy against those of other nations.
Coming 10 months after President George W. Bush took office, Goldin's announcement followed by a day the news that the agency's chief of space flight -- Joseph Rothenberg -- will retire Dec. 15.
Goldin said there was no connection between the back-to-back resignations, but they both come on the heels of White House pressure to rein in an anticipated $5 billion cost overrun in the International Space Station program, NASA's cornerstone project for the 21st century.
With no federal government bailout in the offing, the severe budget woes prompted NASA to stop work on U.S. crew quarters and an American crew rescue vehicle for the station, components deemed crucial to expanding the outpost's current staff of three to six or seven.
Station science budgets also are being slashed by about $1 billion to offset the overrun and without additional staff on the outpost, both project critics and supporters say the onboard crews will have little time to conduct basic research.
Goldin, meanwhile, told employees that he feels no contrition when it comes to overruns in the station construction project, which involves 100,000 workers from 16 nations on four continents.
"I make no apologies. None," he said. "The people have done it for the lowest possible price, and they were honest enough to identify a problem before it occurred. And we're going to solve that problem. And that space station is going to be spectacular."
During his nine-year NASA tenure, Goldin has been both praised and criticized for his "faster, better, cheaper" approach to managing the nation's space agency.
On the one hand, Goldin is seen as a savvy manager that transformed a bloated bureaucracy into a nimbler agency. Gone were the days of high-cost missions that took decades to design, develop and launch. In were low cost missions that flew much more frequently.
Known for his aggressive and sometimes abrasive management style, Goldin slashed NASA budgets by $40 billion during the 1990s, reducing human space flight funding from 48 percent to 38 percent of the agency's total budget.
The NASA and contractor work force that operates the agency's $8 billion shuttle fleet was halved during that time, and day-to-day shuttle operations were gradually turned over to a private contractor, United Space Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and The Boeing Co.
Shuttle safety upgrades both before and during the handover reduced the chance of a catastrophic launch failure from one-in-72 flights to 1-in-437.
The initial privatization of the shuttle fleet, meanwhile, is expected to continue over the next several years, and NASA also is eyeing the eventually privatization of International Space Station operations.
Robotic missions also got a boost during Goldin's tenure as the agency cut the time required to develop and launch Earth- and space-science spacecraft by 40 percent while reducing costs by two-thirds and increasing the number of probes launched each year to four from one.
The high-profile and highly successful Mars Pathfinder mission epitomized the move to "faster, better, cheaper" missions, and funding for basic aeronautical research also flourished, jumping up to 43 percent of the agency's budget from 31 percent.
On the other hand, though, Goldin is seen by some as a dictatorial manager who bungled a $1 billion bid to develop a half-scale prototype for a space shuttle replacement, a project the agency bailed out of earlier this year.
Next page: Hero and Villain
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